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What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#21

I think this is pretty common across different creative forms albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher end. So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s. Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts. I interpret it as the former requiring the crea…

I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#22
This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/:

  SELECT ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate ?ageAtPublication
  WHERE {
    ?author wdt:P569 ?birth .
    ?author wdt:P570 ?death .
    ?author wdt:P800 ?work .
  
    ?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
          wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ;
          wdt:P577 ?publicationDate .
  
    FILTER(?publicationDate  60)
  
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  }
  ORDER BY DESC(?ageAtPublication)
  LIMIT 300

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#23
Douglas Southall Freeman wrote the definitive biography of Robert E Lee over twenty years, publishing it when he was 49; he then went on to publish his seven volume biography on George Washington when he was 62 (he finished the sixth volume on the day he died; the seventh was completed by his research assistants).

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#24

I think this is pretty common across different creative forms albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher end. So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s. Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts. I interpret it as the former requiring the crea…

I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road, and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write, let alone get published. I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also…

100% true about chess but I think there's more nuance to it.

In 6th grade, I had gone to a chess coach who were a friend of my father (technically my father knew his father very well). It was my birthday/a day close to it IIRC and I wanted to learn chess. He was an international-master (or close to it) /National-master (I think he just had one norm less) and he told me about his story and everything, but he said that in a way, he does feel like if he had put the efforts within something like finance for example, he really could earn more than 10 times the money but he said that he really loved chess with a passion. I think that is another element and I think he was within his 30's. Not everyone makes it even that big within chess aside from a very few at the top

You are sort of right in the manner that, as teens grow and the focus of life/dedication from teenage years on solely getting good at chess, diversifies into for example relationships/money-aspects, the mind simply doesn't have enough competition to play chess Comparing this to a 18 year old or 17 year old who just wants to get best at chess and doesn't really want anything else other than chess with their complete and utter dedication.

(There is also another theory recently within Chess of the pressures of being the world champion, from Ding Liren to Gukesh, both have faced tremendous losses after being the best, Gukesh has even lost 75 points after being the world champion, which I believe also has to be because of how many eyes/the pressure building up)

I still like playing chess but all of this makes me also appreciate all the chess players as well in a bit-more behind the scenes manner too. At professional level, calling it taxing sport mentally might even be a bit of an understatement especially for the people within their 30's.

another thing I personally like about Ding and Gukesh both is that they are both humble. They might win or lose but with the brief time that they both had/will have the crown is with their own humbleness. I really like them both a lot. Hope history remembers both their struggles and their humbleness.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#25

This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/ : SELECT ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate ?ageAtPublication WHERE { ?author wdt:P569 ?birth . ?author wdt:P570 ?death . ?author wdt:P800 ?work . ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ; wdt:P577 ?publicationDate . FILTER(?publicationDate 60) SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase…

Can you filter by "major works only"?

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#26
(complete sidetrack)

I think this graph is a great illustration about how anonymising data is hard. It's very easy to isolate individual authors from this list, because there are clear diagonal lines because the year and age are increasing in lockstep. This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection, because of these strong diagonals everywhere.

There's probably also some erroneous data here with a bunch of points representing material written by people at age 34 between about 1920 and 1940 (an obvious horizontal line) when most of the rest of the graph doesn't show any strong horizontal bias for a specific age.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#27
post #11

> In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs. (…) > So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (…) > EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters. This is a slop post. You can’t trust any of the data. It’s baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without doing du…

You're pushing back against openly using LLMs to assist in research for writing articles. In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you want. In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.

I don't think the problem is that they used an LLM to write the article. It seems that the commenter takes issue with them using the LLM to get the data to analyze.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#28

This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/ : SELECT ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate ?ageAtPublication WHERE { ?author wdt:P569 ?birth . ?author wdt:P570 ?death . ?author wdt:P800 ?work . ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ; wdt:P577 ?publicationDate . FILTER(?publicationDate 60) SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase…

Can you filter by "major works only"?

that's kind of what P800 (notable work) is doing, but you can try some approximations to "major work" with "has both an English Wikipedia page and a Goodreads link":

  ?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
        wdt:P577 ?publicationDate ; 
        wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID .

  ?article schema:about ?work ;
           schema:isPartOf  ;
           schema:inLanguage "en" .

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#29
> asked LLMs to compile list of 10-20 writers considered canon in each decade since 1800, then identify all their notable works and years of publication. After some iterations with coding agents I got over 2,000 works by 200 authors.

Wait, so the source data is just LLM hallucinations? It makes sense to use an LLM to build the data collection, but not to build your source data.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#30
"The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality....But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? "

Thoughts on Late Style by Edward Said https://www.edwardsaid.org/articles/thoughts-on-late-style/

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